Congratulations to Ethan Cooke, this year's recipient of the William Stanton Prize which is awarded to a Superior History Honors Thesis. The awards committee noted that Ethan's thesis, "Theory, Reform, and Implementation: Thomas Jefferson and the Eighteenth-Century Educational Debate" was extraordinarily well written. Rooted in well-chosen primary and secondary sources to support the argument, the thesis successfully contextualized Jefferson's ideas within the intellectual climate of the eighteenth-century Atlantic World and persuasively demonstrated how these ideas interacted with and influenced education reforms within the United States.
The William Stanton Prize has kindly been endowed by David Frederick, an alumnus of the University of Pittsburgh. It is named in honor of his mentor William Ragan Stanton, an esteemed American historian who taught in Pitt's History Department from 1962 until 1994.
